The division of the United States into so many wellnigh independent republics, each with official rewards in its gift great enough to excite and to satisfy a considerable ambition, makes fame a palpably provincial thing in America. We say _palpably_, because the larger part of contemporary fame is truly parochial everywhere; only we are apt to overlook the fact when we measure by kingdoms or empires instead of counties, and to fancy a stature for Palmerston or Persigny suitable to the size of the stage on which they act. It seems a much finer thing to be a Lord Chancellor in England than a Chief Justice in Massachusetts; yet the same abilities which carried the chance-transplanted Boston boy, Lyndhurst, to the woolsack, might, perhaps, had he remained in the land of his birth, have found no higher goal than the bench of the Supreme Court. Mr. Dickens laughed very fairly at the "remarkable men" of our small towns; but England is full of just such little-greatness, with the difference that one is proclaimed in the "Bungtown Tocsin" and the other in the "Times." We must get a new phrase, and say that Mr. Brown was immortal at the latest dates, and Mr. Jones a great man when the steamer sailed. The small man in Europe is reflected to his contemporaries from a magnifying mirror, while even the great men in America can be imaged only in a diminishing one. If powers broaden with the breadth of opportunity, if Occasion be the mother of greatness and not its tool, the centralizing system of Europe should produce more eminent persons than our distributive one. Certain it is that the character grows larger in proportion to the size of the affairs with which it is habitually concerned, and that a mind of more than common stature acquires an habitual _stoop_, if forced to deal lifelong with little men and little things.